| This study examines moments of intersection between two discursive fields--poetics and language theory--during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The title, Motivating Words, identifies two types of motivation, the quest for cultural authority that may motivate poets' stylistic decisions and the tacit belief in motivated language that I suggest informs poetic practice in this era. Theories of motivated language maintain that language is not a purely arbitrary construct reliant upon cultural convention for its signifying ability, but that there are, rather, naturally arising connections between words and the things they represent. The central aim of this study, then, is to examine how such theories of natural--or motivated--language assert themselves in poetic style. The dissertation's subtitle, Grammar, Philology, Linguistics, and the Case of Poetic Language, identifies the historical axis of language theory against which matters of linguistic motivation and poetic style are examined. Discussions of Lewis Carroll, Victorian working-class poets, and Walt Whitman examine connections between nineteenth-century poetry and the field of comparative philology. Subsequent discussions of H. D.'s Trilogy and African-American dialect poetry from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Sterling Brown demonstrate that twentieth-century poets sought language models outside of mainstream linguistics--in the fields of ethnology, folk studies, Freudian psychology, and the occult, for example. Two related conclusions are reached: first, poetic practice during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grounded its claims for cultural authority on a tacit belief in the power of motivated language; second, differences over the question of motivated language condition changing relations between the fields of linguistics and poetics during those years. |
